DNC Hack: Allegations of Russian involvement taken seriously by White House

Philadelphia: It might have sounded barmy, but extraordinary allegations by the Democratic Party that Moscow is behind a massive leak of internal party emails as a Russian strategy to improve the electoral prospects of the GOP's Donald Trump are being taken seriously.

The charge could be seen as knee jerk, especially as it was the first Democratic Party response to the political embarrassment of it being revealed that party officials had engaged in a partisan conspiracy to disrupt and damage the insurgent primaries campaign by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, which on Sunday forced the resignation of party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

On Friday, hours ahead of WikiLeaks dumping about 20,000 intra-party emails in the public domain, the White House had called in high-ranking security officials to discuss reports, first in The Washington Post, that Russia had acquired an entire database of opposition research by hacking the system at the Democratic National Committee – the meeting included representatives of the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

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Sceptics might see that as a Democratic White House making partisan use of the security apparatus. But because it's so Hollywood-esque, the allegation that Moscow is meddling in the campaign, and how she articulates and makes the charge stick, will be a significant new political challenge for Hillary Clinton.

Election-era street art in Lithuania purports to show the extent of the special relationship between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.Credit:AP

Not even in the depths of the Cold War, would one presidential campaign accuse another of liaising or acting as a surrogate for Moscow or any other foreign capital. But metadata from the released DNC emails reportedly indicates that the party's correspondence passed through Russian computers before WikiLeaks uploaded it.

Since Friday, campaign manager Robby Mook has handled the public response by the Clinton camp.

In a CNN interview on Sunday, he argued that Trump has taken policy positions that matched the thinking of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin – like Trump's view that as president he would be reluctant to defend NATO members from Russian aggression if they had not paid their financial share, which Mook said, was favourable to Putin.

"I think when you put all this together, it's a disturbing picture and voters need to reflect on that," Mook said.

A protester during a demonstration at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, in July.Credit:Bloomberg

In another interview, with the American ABC News, Mook said "experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke in to the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through these websites . . .. It's troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump".

The Trump campaign responded in high dudgeon, accusing the Clinton team of "pure obfuscation". Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort told ABC News: "What they don't want to talk about is what's in those emails".

Russian President Vladimir Putin .Credit:AP

"Are there any ties between Mr Trump, you or your campaign and Putin and his regime?" ABC's George Stephanopoulos demanded of Manafort.

"No, there are not," Manafort, replied. "That's absurd. And, you know, there's no basis to it."

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, visits an exhibition before a meeting at the Strategic Initiatives Agency in Moscow, Russia, on Thursday.Credit:AP

CrowdStrike, a cyber forensic firm, claimed in June that two competing Russian intelligence hacker groups had breached the DNC's computers. And following the WikiLeaks drop on Friday, other experts in the field have said that it appears WikiLeaks acquired the data from Russian intelligence.

Thomas Rid, a professor at King's College London, told The Washington Post that on Saturday, he chatted privately, via Twitter, with an entity claiming to have released the email cache to WikiLeaks.

Going by the name Guccifer 2.0, the entity claimed responsibility for the June penetration of the DNC and several independent analysts interviewed by The Post, have concluded that Guccifer 2.0, who claims to be Romanian, is likely linked to Russia.

"We've been looking at this very closely from both the technical and non-technical spheres," said Richard Barger, chief information officer for ThreatConnect, a cyber intelligence software firm. "Based on our analysis, we strongly feel Guccifer2 is linked to a Russian information operations campaign and is not the independent Romanian hacker that he claims to be."

Some analysts have concluded that last week's DNC hack and a 2004 breach of Ukrainian election computers were the work of a group calling itself Cyber Berkut, which is believed to act for one of two Russian intelligence agencies which are suspected of breaking into computers at the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff – and both of which are thought to have gained access to the DNC system, with each not necessarily knowing that they other was there.

Michael Vickers, who served as undersecretary of defence for intelligence from 2011 to 2015, said Russia was known to mess with elections in its region, but cyber incursions into the US would amount to an historic and significant change, even in an era of more aggressive Russian intelligence gathering.

Making clear that he no longer had direct access to such deliberations, Vickers said: "people who have looked at it, have said it looks like groups that have been tied to Russian intelligence".

­But in Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Pskov countered, telling Reuters: "I completely rule out a possibility that the [Russian] government or the government bodies have been involved in this".

Analysts pose competing theories on any Moscow motive, ranging for a wish to provide a partisan leg-up for Trump over Clinton; to a practice, which in Russia is called kompromat (compromising material on politicians), – Moscow believed that the recent release of the Panama Papers was a US sponsored effort to embarrass Russia, so Russia retaliates with a cyber break in at the DNC.

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Mook identified CrowdStrike as one of several cyber firms brought in in June when the DNC suspected a breach. In mid-June it concluded the intruders appeared to include a group it had identified in the past as "Cozy Bear" or "APT 29" – and that it had had access for a year. Another group, "Fancy Bear" or "APT 28," had entered the system in April.

There is a long tradition of countries spying on each other and hauling off whatever information they acquired. But in teasing out the quantum leap in the accusations against Moscow, The New York Times put it this way – in so opportunely releasing the DNC files in the brief hiatus between the major party conventions, the hacked date had been "weaponised" because the leak was an attempt to throw the election.